Twin currents of blood and pus were coursing from a ragged hole in the mare’s hoof, mixing into a thin red-yellow rivulet that dripped down and spattered the stump beneath the fetlock. Ned could taste it—the rich, glistening flavour of infection. Bile streamed up his throat. He looked away, sucked on forest air. When he felt surer of his stomach, he turned back and saw the vet swabbing at the rotted hoof with a cloth she’d dipped in iodine.

Through all of this, the mare had stayed more or less still. It allowed the vet to clean the wound and patch it with a kind of tar or glue Ned did not recognise.

When the vet was happy with her work she stood up and lowered the hoof to the ground. She coaxed the mare into taking a gentle step forward. Once the horse was steady, she patted its neck and returned her chisel, screwdriver, cloth and bottle of iodine to the shed.

Ned waited for the vet to remember he was there. When she gave no sign of it, he spoke up.

‘Is that it?

‘She’ll need a few weeks of rest.’

‘Will she live?’

The mare had begun grazing on the nearby grass. The vet rubbed her hands on her trousers. ‘She will unless you kill her.’

Ned thanked her. He retrieved the stump and returned it to its original spot in the garden. Then he walked to the mare, watched her eat, tried to let gladness fill him. Tried to imagine how Maggie’s face would look when he told her. What she’d say about what he had done here.

With his sister’s expression fixed in his mind, he found that he had the courage to raise the thing he’d been avoiding. ‘There’s something else.’

The vet let his statement hang, gave him room in her garden to explain himself. When he did not—for his courage had died in the chill of her silence—she indicated the crate he’d brought with an angled neck. ‘You’re referring to that.’

‘I am.’

She waited a moment longer—just long enough for Ned to think she was going to turn him away—before she pointed to a workbench in the open shed. Ned lifted the crate and carefully placed it on the surface. He began removing the straps. Straightaway he wanted to stop; he wanted to take the crate and leave, to go home, to keep hiding it in his father’s shed, answer no questions and face no consequences, and continue his summer of lonesome killing in peace.